Ellisburg incursion
|conflict= Ellisburg incursion |date= February 2nd , 2001 |place= Ellisburg |result= * New S-Class threat is assigned * New quarantine site is created |side1=* PRT Operatives *Toronto Protectorate |side2= Kingdom of Ellisburg |forces1=this doesn't work |forces2= |casual1=Unpowered operatives are massacred |casual2=No meaningful damage }} was a PRT operation following exceptionally unfortunate trigger event. Prelude Small town gets a new parahuman, and shortly stops displaying any signs of life.Span of a few days, quaint little Ellisburg disappears from the grid, communications and power cut, no cars or people getting out. Guys upstairs sent some heroes in, we got a brief report before they defaulted to radio silence. Report doesn’t tell us anything except they think the whole crime spree was all the one guy.” - Excerpt from Interlude 16.x In late January, the local police started getting reports of pets going missing from backyards.First couple days, pets are disappearing from back yards. Outdoor cats don't return. Insect population declines steeply. Open suspicions are raised about possibility of coyotes to explain the pets, or perhaps a voracious rodent population being tied to water levels with the adjacent river. - Comment by Wildbow on SpacebattlesPets disappear from inside houses. 'Shapeshifter' villain (actually larger, humanoid minions) makes appearances one after another, but nobody is getting hurt so much as they're getting scared. He strikes targets of no apparent consequence. The natural response at this juncture for a town this size is to call in cops from neighboring cities. One guy doesn't necessarily involve PRT involvement, especially when all reports suggest he's relatively harmless. Visiting police set up at the town's hotel, ready to act. - Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles The next day cell phone towers are attacked. Next wave of creatures serves to cut power and telephone lines, attack cell towers, and generate EM signals to scramble other means of communication. Car underbellies and tires are savaged. The creations move through the city, house to house, from the perimeter to the center, then on reaching the center, touch base with Nilbog and get the signal. They explode outward from one point, and people panic, running, they arm themselves and fight. Every time one is killed, they're dragged back to Nilbog, one adult becoming three child-sized creatures that are specialized for cutting down more adults. If the creatures report a problem (one family locks themselves in a bomb shelter, one guy uses an homemade flame thrower to attack a whole crowd of the things), he sends out a specialized creation to answer it. If any die, others carry the biomass back to him. - Comment by Wildbow on SpacebattlesWith transportation so systematically crippled, and the attention to detail of hundreds of loyal soldiers with acute senses, escaping on foot is the only option, and the creatures prove faster. Some people make it beyond the city limits, only to be attacked the first moment they stop for breath or to use the washroom in the bushes. - Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles1-2 days of problems, nothing that would make you pack up and leave town. 1 day of regular appearances by 'shapeshifter' at banks and elsewhere, with him more focused on getting cloth for making costumes for his favored ones than money or anything else. Attack occurs overnight and into late hours of the morning. - Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles A number of new villains appeared but the common motive behind their crimes indicated that the local authorities were dealing with one Shifter-type villain. “Followed by a crime spree. Span of a few days, quaint little Ellisburg disappears from the grid, communications and power cut, no cars or people getting out. Guys upstairs sent some heroes in, we got a brief report before they defaulted to radio silence. Report doesn’t tell us anything except they think the whole crime spree was all the one guy.” - Excerpt from Interlude 16.x Ellisburg is quiet not dogs barking no bees buzzing. Nothing escaped the town, human or otherwise.If they had, the strike team would have gone in with more info than they had. - Comment by Wildbow in Chrysalis 20.2 Faced with a town that had disappeared off of a map The PRT sent in mixed cape and PRT Squads to try and find the culprit, Jamie Rinke. They were greeted by an empty town. Just like the residents they realized something too late, where were all the insects.Evan picked up the radio, “Squad two here. Anything out there, boys? Anything at all? Over.” “Nothing at one, over.” “Ditto from three, one of my squad just said they’re not seeing any critters. No birds, rodents or strays. Over.” No animals, no people. ... Long seconds passed. He changed the settings on his flashlight back to normal. “What was that about?” “No bugs. Dark night like this, you’d think there’d be a moth or some mosquitoes gathering around the light.” ... Evan murmured to his squad. “We foam him, which shouldn’t be hard with how slow he’s moving, then we burn him because that’s protocol for dealing with Changers. We’ll do it quickly and without hesitation because he’s got a Trump rating as well. Don’t know what cards he has up his sleeves. Might want to disappear us like he did with the rest of the locals.” “And the wildlife.” “And the local wildlife, yeah. Safeties off.” - Excerpt from Interlude 16.x PRT is unable to get reliable intelligence past few initial days. Events Operatives notice the scale of the incident too late. Toronto capes, that were supposed to provide fire-support, flee the ensuing battle. Aftermath Ellisburg quarantined,“Lady’s not wrong,” he admitted, “We’ve been able to piece together who he is. We got security camera footage from the early stages of the incident, just last week, and we found his face. One of the top geeks from the Protectorate then found other cases of his face around the city and found a name. Jamie Rinke.” ... “Rinke?” “You mean Nilbog.” “Huh?” “That’s what he called himself. He’s alive and presumably well. I saw out the window as the chopper pulled us out, Nilbog retreating to hide in some building, his creatures were returning to their hiding places. I expect the man will be alive for some time.” “Why?” She wheezed the question. “Far as I could tell, he’s wearing one of his creations. Made him bulletproof, maybe fireproof. We won’t be able to bomb the area. He’s created beasts that multiply if you set them on fire. Did you see those?” She shook her head. “He may have other countermeasures for other courses of action. You’ll get your chance to talk to the Chief Director, but last I heard, they’re planning to wall the city off. They’ll let the motherfucker be the god of his own little town, so long as he doesn’t try to expand any further, which they’re saying he won’t. I almost envy him.” - Excerpt from Interlude 16.x Jamie Rinke recognized as S-Class threat.There’s six class S threats active in the world at large. The Endbringers make up three of them. The Slaughterhouse Nine as a group are a fourth. - Excerpt from Queen 18.3 Life trajectories of two survivors are deeply altered. The town was quarantined with all the possibly proper precautions.:RedX: Twenty years of fallout cleanup is better than everyone dying to uberlocasts. It's arguably better than the moral and psychologial hazard of letting Nilbog continue to exist. Wildbow: I find there's a trend, and you definitely see it highlighted in PRT quest, but you see it in arguments like this too. The first mistake people make is forgetting the person involved. Nilbog was a human once, who watched TV and rented movies. He was lonely, odd, but fairly intelligent. He has a sense about nuclear weapons. He knows about armies and all that. Crazy as he becomes, he retains that. That's the first mistake. Forgetting that there's a man there, spending weeks and days with his creations, he loves them, they're his art, his existence. But he has his good moments, and he has his depressive, paranoid moments, where he thinks about how they're dying a little faster every generation, and that there's a very real possibility that people might try to assassinate him, or take his creations away from him by fire, gun, or bomb. He thinks about these things. He dwells on them, and he takes measures. The second mistake that Spacebattlers tend to make, in my estimation, is forgetting about the shards. As Nilbog's content to be passive, you can assume: 1. His shard is broken. 2. His shard is powerful, and it's being utilized to secure Scion/Eden's plans more than it's being used to stress test and evolve anything. 3. Both of the above. So, question. What eventuality is this tightly packed biome of custom-made living things placed there for? Remember the long-term agenda, too. Conflict. What if he's there because the entities wanted something out there to generate chaos in the event that a Bakuda or a US army or a Level 9001 Dauntless annihilated the area and most of the local population? You know what happens if you nuke the site with bunker busters and try to quarantine the site after the fact? People start getting sick. You discover that there's a fuckton of airborne parasites that've been scattered by the bombs, waterborne parasites getting into nearby sites. Stuff that was contained in tougher creations with hard carbon shells, released during/after the fact. Conventional filtration doesn't necessarily work, because the parasites crawl over, through and around, negating the benefit of hazmat and masks and water filtration systems and all that. The people that get sick start changing. They develop into problems that could give many parahumans a run for their money. The PRT has a sense of this. They consider every threat, and they have thinkers and Dragon working to monitor major problem sites. They get a squad of thinkers to check on Nilbog every week or two, and they get responses like "Black!" "Nine!" "Trojan Horses, Director." They think about leaving him alone, and they get a response of "Yellow", "Three" "Poisoned apple trees, sir." from the same three thinkers. They leave him alone, they keep a close eye on him, they have research teams and tinkers work on developing ideas that might get a response from the thinkers that isn't quite so grave, and they keep things quiet, so the public doesn't realize how dangerous that particular situation really is. - Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles Category:Fights